


Shoe Shine

by MacBudgie



Category: The Property of Hate
Genre: Gen, Original Character-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-29
Updated: 2017-10-29
Packaged: 2019-01-25 21:04:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12541176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MacBudgie/pseuds/MacBudgie
Summary: Just a little adventure in the world of The Property of Hate with some original characters.





	Shoe Shine

Our protagonist's original designs- Soaprano (left) is exactly the same as she is in this, but Bootleg's (right) design has been slightly changed. She no longer has the neck threading, the stomach pockets, the chest lace, and her hands are loops of lace.

***

Smoke hung in the air of the cavernous marketplace.  
Soaprano coughed, wafting it away with her hand.  
“Hey, d’you mind?” said the smoke in a nasal voice. It turned its face- a black mask- towards her. “I might be a hot body, but hands off.”  
Her hand halted in the air. If she could, she would have blushed, but instead she rolled her eyes. Quite literally. The two taps that made up her eyes rotated, turning full circle.  
“Apologies.”  
She left the smoke behind, walking to a low arch. Its four columns rested on the floor in a square shape, not unlike a marquee, shielding a table covered in assorted items.  
“Soaps!” said a cheerful voice. The peak of the arch, where the four columns met, opened into a rectangular mouth. “Good to see you. And what have you brought me today?”  
She dug in the deep pockets of her dress, pulling out a single shoe.  
“It is you, it is yours,” she whispered, placing it on the table.  
“Hm. Not much, is it? That barely pays off the cost of your left foot.”  
“There isn’t much out there.”  
“Ooh, there never is, is there? Listen, sweetie, if you want to pay off that body, you’re going to need a fair lot of shoes.”  
“It’s dangerous out there.”  
“Oh, very well, you’ve tempted me. In exchange for that shoe, you can have this.”  
One of the columns nudged something off the table. It was a curtain rod, a shaped piece of gilt on one end.  
“If you use that to protect yourself while go out and get something good? Then, sweetie, that might just pay off your body!”  
Soaprano placed one hand on the rod, humming to herself as she thought. This was probably a bad idea, but what else could she do? There wasn’t much you could do, held in debt for yourself. And she could use something to protect herself out there.  
She nodded.  
“It is you, it is yours!” said Marquis.  
“It is me, it is mine,” said Soaprano, and picked up the rod.  
It was part of herself now. That meant it was more than just a stick in her hands- all those books where they said the weapon was an extension of your body? Those were all true to her, right now, with this rod.  
She swished it a few times, pointing it and moving it as though it was a spear.  
“You’re a natural!” chirped Marquis. “Now go out there! Stay safe!”  
***  
Now, all she had to do was choose a gate.  
Soaprano hummed, and tapped her fingers on the rod as she considered. The Plains were unlikely to give her much, this time of year. She could go out onto the Shores, but that was where everyone, herself included, usually went. Any item that happened to wash up would be snatched and claimed straight away, and she didn’t usually happen to be so lucky. She could go to-  
There was a shout from the ceiling, and her head snapped up. A figure was falling from the cavern’s many crisscrossing beams and lines, plummeting towards the ground.  
Straight towards her.  
She ducked quickly, jumping out of the way.  
There was no crash.  
Soaprano looked up slowly, cautiously, brushing the ground’s dust off of her dress.  
“Whoops, sorry,” said the ‘figure’. She was swinging gently above the ground, with what looked like bootlaces threaded through her face holding onto some unseen beam on the ceiling.  
She dropped to the floor in a crouch, the bootlaces winding back up into her until they reached her feet.  
“Sorry. Missed a step, and found myself down here! Good thing I have these, huh?”  
Soaprano nodded slowly.  
“It is alright.”  
“I’m Bootleg. Who’re you?”  
“Soaprano.”  
“As in- hah! Nice one. Pretty proud of mine, y’know. Boot, filled with bootlaces, plus bootleg pants look like m’legs…but Soaprano’s pretty cool too.”  
“I am glad you like it.”  
The girl grinned, as far as she could tell. She didn’t have a mouth, but the shoe-like holes in her face slanted in the suggestion of a smile.  
“So, what’cha doing?”  
Soaprano looked around. She still hadn’t completely decided where she was going to go.  
“I am going to find some items to sell.”  
“Cool! Can I come with you?”  
She looked at her in surprise.  
“You wish to also find items?”  
“Nah, I wanna have some fun!”  
Soaprano looked at her blankly.  
“Y’know…jumping off stuff- hah! Hanging around…”  
“Was that what you were doing when you almost squished me?”  
Bootleg looked not even a tad sheepish.  
“Yup!”  
Soaprano considered this. It would certainly be useful to have someone with her out there- more useful than the rod, at least- especially when you considered she came without a price.  
Or at least, she hoped. She could be a scam.  
But what was there to lose? Even had she been one of Her top-level lackeys, she couldn’t have much reason to team up with a random, unimportant stranger just to see her killed. Besides, Bootleg seemed genuine, even if she was a little weird.  
Not that that was a measure of anything.  
They were all weird here.  
“Very well. You may come.”  
***  
In the end, they went out the orange door.  
It was called orange, not because it was physically a bright orange colour, but instead because of the place it led out to.  
Some called it the Rusting Garden, others the Scrapyard, but either way it was undeniably orange, the reddish-brown colour of decaying metal.  
That wasn’t to say the Garden wasn’t beautiful, because it was. Oil drums became tree trunks, varying curls of aluminium cans peppering their sides like fungi. Copper roses, their stems made of barbed wire, curled out beside the thin pathway.  
Bootleg laughed, poking one with the loop of lace she used as a hand; the flower wobbled back and forth.  
“Hey, these’re pretty,” she said.  
“They are,” agreed Soaprano.  
“Can you sell them?”  
“No.”  
“Why not?”  
“They are useless in the Market. All of it has rusted together, and no piece can be pulled apart from the rest. They are quite beautiful, however.”  
“Huh. You don’t talk much, do ya?”  
“No.”  
Bootleg shrugged at that, and went back to touching each of the ‘plants’ they passed. She was sensible enough to stay on the path, however. While it might look nice from here, the metal ‘grass’ was sharp, certainly sharp enough to cut the soft leather of her feet.  
“So uh…you been here long?” asked Bootleg, after a few moment’s silence.  
“A while, perhaps a few weeks. And yourself?”  
“Yeah…not that long? I guess? I dunno,” she shuffled her huge feet, “haven’t counted.”  
Soaprano nodded.  
“Just been having fun, y’know? Mucking around. This’ll be my first time leaving the Market since I got here.”  
She looked at her in surprise.  
“Is that so?”  
“Yup. Didn’t really feel the need to leave, I guess.”  
The two walked in silence for a moment. A flock of small black shapes crossed the path ahead of them. They were round, but only approximately, bulging and distorting strangely in places, their surfaces shiny like oil.  
“Wants, right?” said Bootleg. “Seen ‘em half-dead, dragged into the Marketplace.”  
Soaprano nodded slowly. She had only seen them once or twice.  
“They live by your side, providing you with support of some kind, do they not? They benefit from the arrangement, growing into Needs.”  
“Yeah.”  
“Then they leave you.”  
“And if you kill ‘em and bag ‘em, they’re worth a finger or so.”  
The flock finished crossing, and the pair continued.  
In the distance, they could see the usual wildlife of the land. Most were small, things that weren’t worth the time to catch. Little white lies, a stray compliment, and of course the ever present trees. They looked odd, among the smaller metal ones.  
“This is booorrriiiiiiiing,” complained Bootleg, after a few minutes. “When will we get somewhere interesting?”  
“There will be a clearing ahead, which we will stop the night at before progressing.”  
“Anything fun?”  
“By your definition of fun, I would not think so.”  
Bootleg made a huffing sound, blowing air through her eyeholes.  
“Isn’t it supposed to be, y’know, dangerous out here?”  
“It can be, if you stray from the path, or say the wrong words.”  
As soon as Soaprano said that, she knew she was going to regret it.  
Bootleg’s holes slanted up into a grin, as the bootlaces trailing behind her shot up to catch the branches of a nearby metal tree.  
It was only a few seconds later before she herself was standing in the tree, doing a little tap dance with her enormous feet on a branch.  
“This isn’t all that great,” she said, to Soaprano’s worried look. “But I’ve been deprived of doing this for, what? Twenty minutes? Man that’s a long time.”  
***  
They slept the night in the clearing. There was an inn there, and although it was too expensive for the pair to stay in, the surrounding area was fairly safe too. They weren’t the only ones out there, as it happened, so the floor of the clearing was practically littered with bodies as the sun set.  
That was new, but it was probably just some future protagonists running around getting ready to be someone.  
“So, who do you wanna be?” asked Bootleg. “You know, when you get out of here? I want to be a superhero.”  
Soaprano thought for a moment.  
“I like to sing,” she admitted.  
“No, really?” laughed Bootleg.  
She nodded.  
“Show me! C’mon, sing something! Oh, please? Just a little?”  
Soaprano smiled, and after a moment gave in.  
Her voice was loud, and strong, and she sang- unsurprisingly- in a high soprano voice. She sang operatically, too, holding notes for long, much longer than any human could accomplish, and loudly.  
She stopped when she realised the entire clearing was staring at her.  
“That was amazing!” grinned Bootleg.  
“Keep singing!” said one of the others in the clearing.  
After a moment, she resumed.  
***  
“Are you still bored?” asked Soaprano, the next morning.  
Bootleg shrugged.  
“I dunno. The clearing was actually pretty fun, I guess. The singing was cool, and everyone was so weird.”  
“They are weird back in the Marketplace, as well.”  
“Yeah but…there, it’s the weirdness of people who’re…unfinished, I guess? Like, they’re changing all the time. And they don’t fit together right. But out here, everyone’s got cool themes and names and speech patterns and stuff! They fit together! It’s cool.”  
Soaprano nodded.  
“I suppose that it is rather nice.”  
“So, where’re we going now?”  
“The mountains. You can see, the vegetation is already thinning out, soon we will be almost there.”  
***  
The mountains where somewhat disorientating to the eye that was unused to them. The reason being, the first few feet of rock was in some places translucent, in others transparent, and in still more almost invisible. When they first crossed out of the rusting vegetation and onto the mountainside, Bootleg almost tripped over an invisible rock.  
“Woah,” she said looking around. “That’s pretty cool. Like, I can see the top of the mountain, ‘cause the light’s glinting off the top, but then I can also see where, like, the ordinary rock starts. That’s cool.”  
Soaprano smiled.  
“Hey look!” shouted Bootleg, pointing towards an opening in the side of a mountain. “It looks like a cave!”  
She looked to it doubtfully. What she was pointing towards was barely visible in the bright light this new sun was providing. But it did look like an opening, and it looked like it continued into the more ordinary rock part beneath the surface.  
If it was a cave, however, there could be anything in it.  
“It could be dangerous,” warned Soaprano.  
“Yeah, but it could also be fun!”  
Bootleg turned to her, a slightly more serious look on her face.  
“Listen. If it’s a cave, there could be something valuable in there, maybe something someone’s never found before! Or has, but hasn’t told anyone about it…anyway! We’ll be fine, too. I’ve got my laces, and you’ve got your…rod spear thing, so anything that turns up will get a serious whopping! Let’s do it!”  
Soaprano nodded.  
“Very well.”  
The path wasn’t very well-defined out here, in an area where the rocks were half-invisible at best, so it wasn’t much of a deviation to go up to the ‘cave.’ It was a bit of a climb, and Soaprano was puffing a little by the time they got up there, mostly to fit with the character she had built for herself.  
They peered in.  
“It does appear to be a cave,” she agreed.  
The two stepped in.  
Following the narrow passage, the light was dim, but they could still see around them, even when they got into the rock part. Looking up, they could see thin seams of transparent rock, running through the mountain above them, culminating in a round stub in the ceiling above them.  
“Stalactites,” stated Soaprano, running her gilt fingers along one.  
Then, they rounded a corner.  
The tunnel opened up around them, into a wide cavern, almost as big as the Marketplace. Needle-like and great thick stalactites hung from the high ceiling, occasionally meeting a stalagmite growing up from the floor to make a huge, dripping, transparent column. What with them providing a source of light, they seemed to glow slightly, too.  
Bootleg then completely ruined the moment, after spotting a large hole in the ground, running towards it, jumping into it, and using her laces to swing safely to the other side.  
“That was fun,” she said to Soaprano’s aghast look. “What? I told you I like-”  
That was when they heard it.  
The scritch sound of needle feet against the cave floor, growing closer.  
Soaprano swung her rod into a fighting position towards the sound.  
Bootleg ran back to her, then whipped her laces out, so they floated in front of her, crossing her chest.  
She didn’t know what good they would do.  
But it was better than nothing, when a Fear was after you.  
The Fear trotted out of a tunnel, a little way in front of them. It looked at them, as though considering them, sizing them up.  
Then it leapt.  
Soaprano batted it out of the air with her rod. It landed on its feet, spun, and got ready to leap again. She stabbed at it first, but it dodged out of the way.  
As she stumbled, the Fear danced around her, getting ready to stab.  
Bootleg got to it first, wrapping her laces around it, trying to trap it.  
“Quick, stab it!” she shouted, as it started to wriggle out.  
Soaprano, getting her bearings once more, did just that. It didn’t do much, so she did it again, and again, and its body shattered.  
They stopped.  
Then, they burst out laughing.  
“We defeated a Fear!” yelled Bootleg.  
Soaprano sat down, still grinning from the relief.  
“Turns out, they are not as difficult to defeat as one may think,” she said. Then she looked at it closely. “Although this one may have been weakened; I can see the cracks in its head-”  
“Shut up,” said Bootleg, leaning forward. “We just defeated a Fear.”  
Soaprano smiled at her, and let herself be helped up.  
“C’mon, let’s go see what it was doing.”  
***  
The tunnel that the Fear had come from was more well-lit than the one they had come in from. There were more formations on the walls, which Bootleg once or twice looked up through in an attempt to look up the mountain. There was also another light too, a softer, whiter one, which seemed to be coming from ahead of them.  
Soaprano touched a hand to the wall, and it came away dusty.  
No, not dust. It was something else, something crystalline, which sent glints rainbow colour across her hand as it reflected the light.  
“What’s that?” asked Bootleg.  
“I do not know,” said Soaprano, and gently blew it off her hand.  
As the tiny crystal shards were sent to drift to the ground, she could have sworn she heard the laughter of a child.  
The two walked on, the walls slowing getting brighter and brighter, more and more of that stuff building up on them.  
And then everything shone.  
It took a moment for their eyes to adjust to the sudden bright light.  
When they had, in front of them they saw a big crystal.  
But that doesn’t correctly describe it, so let me try again with more words, and we’ll see if that works better.  
In front of them…hung an enormous crystal, trapped in a column of perfectly clear rock, reflecting rays of white light all around the room. This was in turn reflected by the floor, which was a deep pool of smaller crystals, some as big as fists, others almost as small as those floating around in the air.  
“What is this place?” asked Soaprano in a whisper.  
“I think…these are memories,” said Bootleg. “Hear of ‘em once or twice.”  
Soaprano nodded slowly. These were rather expensive, and difficult to find.  
She picked one from the pool, a hand-sized, looking into its depth. It reflected an image of herself, one from her past which she almost didn’t recognise.  
She put it in her pocket. Even only one or two more of that size or smaller would pay off the debt she was in, and then some.  
After a moment, Bootleg pulled one out too.  
“How d’you see the memories?” she asked, turning it over while Soaprano rummaged in the pool. “Never seen ‘em used before.”  
“They must enter you, I believe,” she said. “Become a part of you.”  
“What, without saying all that ‘It is me’ stuff? That’s weird.”  
“I believe that there are a few items that work like this. Dreams are another. But they do not function as a part of you like your body does, so I’ve heard. They only remain in your mind.”  
“Huh.”  
Soaprano, having found enough Memories, straightened up.  
“Aren’t you going to get more?”  
“No. If we are careful, we can keep coming back to this place, every so often, and if we are careful we may keep this place a secret.  
“So like, no-one’ll know about it? And we can keep all of this?”  
“Not quite. It is almost certain that we have stumbled across a well-kept secret, one that only certain merchants know about.”  
“Ah, I getcha.”  
“Yes. In that case, shall we?”  
Soaprano indicated towards the exit.  
“I dunno…I want to see more.”  
Bootleg pointed towards another tunnel, at the other end of the cavern.  
“C’mon!”  
She ran towards it. After a moment, Soaprano, looking around a little nervously, followed behind her. If there had been one Fear, there could be others. And even if this place was a stockpile used by others, that didn’t mean they wouldn’t let dangerous creatures patrol it, to keep the unwitting traveller from stumbling across such wealth.  
The tunnel was as the one they had walked in through, although after a few minutes of walking (quickly, due to Bootleg’s impatience), it seemed to be rather longer than the other.  
“Stop,” said Soaprano suddenly.  
Bootleg turned around impatiently.  
“What?”  
“Listen.”  
They did, and in the silence they could hear better the sound that had alerted Soaprano. It was quiet, echoing strangely in the cave system.  
It sounded like ‘Pod.’  
“What is that?” asked Bootleg.  
“I do not know. However, it sounds like it is ahead of us, and that it is getting louder.”  
The two looked at one another.  
“Run?”  
“Yes.”  
They did, Soaprano’s gilt lion’s feet pounding loudly on the floor.  
As soon as they did, the noise got louder. It sounded almost excited.  
Pod. Pod. Pod!  
They broke into the room with the pool of Memories, swerved around it and its giant crystal, and kept on running.  
Pod! Pod! Pod!  
They found themselves in the first cavern. Bootleg was about to keep running, but Soaprano stopped her. The noise, the ever-present cry of ‘Pod’, was coming from in front of them, too.  
It was at that point that the creature chasing them finally caught up behind them.  
They turned around.  
For all the suspense, the creature wasn’t all that realistic. It looked scratchy and flat, as though someone had drawn a large circle in the air, then added a simple smiling face and four lines with curved ends as limbs. They were of varying sizes, and the creature floated, the rest of the cavern visible in the spaces.  
“Pod!” it- Pod- said.  
The other one emerged from the tunnel behind them.  
“…any hope they’re friendly?” said Bootleg.  
“Considering the state of that Fear, I doubt it.”  
“Right. The hole!” declared Bootleg, dashing towards it. Immediately, her bootlaces wrapped around the stalactites above, and she motioned to jump in.  
“What about me?” asked Soaprano.  
“It’s alright!”  
The bootlace re-wrapped itself around the stalactite, so that it had a long trailing end. This reached out towards Soaprano, wrapping loosely around her wrist.  
With that, Bootleg jumped down the hole, the laces holding her up immediately tightening so that she glided down, rather than fell. Looking into it, Soaprano could see her.  
“Come on!” she shouted. “I’m down!”  
The lace slid from her wrist to tie firmly around her waist.  
“Just step into it!”  
“Pod!” said one of the Pods.  
She looked at it.  
She really didn’t want to step into that hole but…it was either that, or probably-certain-death against those things.  
Soaprano turned back to the hole, shuffling forward.  
It was a long way down.  
“Just jump!” yelled Bootleg, so she did.  
For a single, horrifying moment, she fell.  
Then the lace caught her, and she began to drift down, clutching the lace tightly in one hand, her feet wriggling underneath, unsupported.  
Finally, she landed on solid ground again, in yet another cavern. The lace went slack, as Bootleg retracted some of it back into her.  
“What’s that?” she asked, pointing at the wall. There were strange green things on it, like pea pods.  
“Pod!”  
They looked up. Though the Pod was too big to fit into the hole with its limbs outstretched like that, it was trying its best.  
“We must try to find another way out,” said Soaprano, turning away. “There may be others.”  
Bootleg nodded, and once more they ran, down the narrow corridor. As they went, it slowly widened, slowly getting bigger until it was almost like a longer cavern.  
Then, Bootleg ran into an invisible wall.  
“It’s that clear rock!” she exclaimed, touching it.  
Soaprano caught up, feeling along the wall.  
There was a crash from behind him, accompanied with a cry of ‘Pod!’  
“Here!” she exclaimed, as the wall of rock ended. “There is a space!”  
The pair hurried through, finding that the space ended only a few metres ahead. But it continued on to their right. They felt along it, turning when the rock turned, occasionally hitting heads on the rock.  
“It’s like a maze!” said Bootleg.  
“Pod!” said the Pod.  
It was close now, they could see it through the rock.  
“We must keep going!” prompted Soaprano.  
They did, moving at a more hurried pace now. They could hear the Pod behind them, attempting to drag its enormous bulks through the corridors of the maze. As it was, Soaprano was surprised it even managed to get to it.  
“I can see light ahead!” said Bootleg excitedly. “We’re almost there!”  
They suddenly fell into the original cavern, from a passageway halfway up the wall they hadn’t seen before.  
“There’s the exit!”  
It was also the place where the second Pod still stood.  
Soaprano gasped as Bootleg was struck down, impaled by a spiky, scratchy limb.  
“Pod!” it said happily, pulling it back out. “Pod! Pod!”  
Soaprano dropped to her knees over Bootleg, who wheezed at her.  
“Are you alright?”  
“No, of course not. I’ve been impaled, in case you haven’t noticed.”  
“Can you move?”  
Bootleg shifted, trying to stand up. After a moment, she managed it, but she was almost bent double from the pain, her excess laces wrapping around her to provide support.  
And then she fell over again.  
Soaprano turned to face the Pod.  
It grinned that same, unchanging grin.  
“Pod,” it said, as though it were a statement.  
As it floated closer, she pulled out her rod, getting into a fighting stance. She doubted she would be able to do anything.  
“Pod!”  
The creature in front of them paused. That cry hadn’t seemed to come from it- and it sounded different from the other cries. Where those had been happy, and confident, this one sounded scared.  
“Pod! Pod! Pod!”  
The Pod turned to the sound- the corridor they had entered in through, and floated towards it.  
Soaprano burst out laughing in relief.  
“We did it! We trapped the-”  
Then she turned to Bootleg, who was still on the ground, and once more dropped to her knees.  
“Damn,” she wheezed. “We defeated the thing, and now I can’t even get up.”  
“The memories should be able to heal you,” said Soaprano, pulling a crystal out of her pocket.  
“Cool.”  
She was about to break it, but then she saw something, in the slit the Pod’s limb had made in Bootleg’s flesh. It was black, but a shiny black, not like the matte colour of the laces.  
“What is that?”  
“What is what?”  
The laces immediately shifted, to cover whatever it was.  
“I saw something, something inside of you. You cannot deny that. What was it?”  
“Can’t you just break the crystal, and I’ll explain later?”  
“No. If it is something bad, we must get it out of you know.”  
“And if it’s something okay?”  
“Then you would tell me what it is.”  
Bootleg sighed, a soft wheezing sound.  
“It’s a Want.”  
Her eyes would have widened, if they could.  
“You have a Want inside of you? Why? How?”  
The lace holes on her face shifted.  
“…because it gives me courage. Listen, when I first came here, I wanted to be cool. I wanted to have fun and stuff with my laces. But I couldn’t.”  
Her voice was growing louder now.  
“I couldn’t do anything, because I was too scared. I knew I could do all those cool things, but when I faced it, I just got too scared!”  
“And when the Want came, all of that went away,” murmured Soaprano.  
“Exactly! You understand, right?”  
Her face looked hopeful.  
“No. You must know that one day, it will leave you.”  
“But that day isn’t today.”  
“When, then? Tomorrow? Next week? No. You must make your own courage, not rely on this thing. It will kill you.”  
Bootleg paused for a moment, then smiled.  
“You really care, don’t you?”  
“Of course I do. You are but a child. Your life should not end because you do not always fit the image of yourself in your head. You are scared? That is alright. So was I, and so am I still.”  
“I’m still keeping it.”  
She shook her head slowly.  
“I was hoping you would not say that.”  
Soaprano reached into the slit, and pulled out the Want.  
Bootleg gasped, as though all the air was being sucked out of her body.  
“What have you-”  
With the other hand, Soaprano broke the Memory.  
***  
There is a girl.  
She is running through some grass, towards a woman sitting on a picnic rug. She is laughing. There is some food set out on the rug, hot drinks, and a pile of the comic books she so loves to read. The woman is her aunt, and she is listening to some music. She smiles at the little girl, and moves over so that they can sit next to each other.  
They are happy.  
***  
Bootleg stared at Soaprano for a long moment, and at the Want still clenched in her hands. The wound had been healed almost completely, with only a tiny speck of paler leather to show that anything had happened before.  
“You really think I can learn to be brave?”  
“I think that many things are possible, in this place.”  
“Thank you.”  
Soaprano helped her up, and the two left the cave, to the sounds of the Pods calling to one another.  
“So, now what?” asked Bootleg.  
“We will go back to the Marketplace. Marquis holds me in debt, only telling me the high price for the parts of myself after I had integrated them. I will pay that off, using the Memories.”  
“Then?”  
“After that…I am not sure.”  
“We should go on an adventure.”  
“I think that that would be very nice.”


End file.
